Musing on Living Our Charism

Knowledge of our furry and feathered friends can teach us much. Whether, furry, feathered or human, we are blessed with our own unique DNA. It is my conviction that our CSJ charism of unity is part of our DNA just as the built-in urge to hibernate or fly south for the winter is intrinsic to some mammals and birds. This gift for creating unity is part and parcel of our spiritual DNA. As daughters and sons of the Joseph family, we do not acquire the charism but rather resonate with it. Through deepening faith and lived experience our awareness of the charism increases.  As we become more sensitive to this gift within us, we are better able to release its giftedness. 

Lately, I have been prayerfully reflecting on our CSJ spirituality and wondering how its way of life might be stated in terms more accessible to today’s seekers. I have discovered for myself alternate language in keeping with today’s thinking. I hope I have recaptured the essence of the spirituality which Médaille initially articulated using the terms uncreated Trinity and created Trinity.

Médaille used the concept of the uncreated Trinity and created Trinity to foster fidelity to the charism.  He ascribed respectively active and all inclusive love, self-emptying love and communing love to the Father, Son and Spirit and the virtues of zeal, obedience and cordial charity respectively to Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  Recently, in pondering the link between our CSJ spirituality with the living out of our charism I’ve come to think of our spirituality of communion as the three movements of unsparing compassion, deepening contemplation, and evolving consciousness which bring to life the charism.

But we are not alone, as humans, in this endeavor. All creation is living into this dynamic as the Creator, Son and Spirit are the underlying mystery of the universe which is like an invisible and hidden music that interplays beneath and within the visible familial roles of both humans and creatures. This awareness can bring an intentional manner of being that enables us to live the CSJ spirituality with purpose. Thus our everyday actions put “skin on our spirituality”.

My musing on our spirituality leads me to marvel at how the inborn nature of the animal world mirrors aspects of our own spiritual orientation. We are one!

Earth Church and Christian Discipleship

Since Vatican II, as Christians we have been reminded of the call to “read the signs of the times.” To do so is to root the call to discipleship in the “here and now”. Our “here and now” is our presence in a world, at once sacred and beautiful through which we experience God’s indwelling and divine reflection and simultaneously a world under intense environmental distress that threatens all life systems and results in profound human suffering. In this context it is perhaps little wonder that Pope Francis chose to be named for the patron saint of ecology, Francis of Assisi! 

Like his predecessors, John Paul 11 and Benedict XV1, Francis is a leader wholeheartedly committed to the Christian call to care for the Earth. In the recent Encyclical, Lumen Fidei, begun by Benedict and finished by Pope Francis we read: “Faith, by revealing the love of God the Creator, enables us to respect nature all the more, and to discern in it a grammar written by the hand of God and a dwelling place entrusted to our protection and care”. (#55) Through this Encyclical, Francis adds to the vibrant and evolving tradition of Catholic Social Teaching in which we have seen increasing and urgent calls to Christians to enter into a new consciousness in creation, revitalized environmental responsibility and partnerships with all peoples who have a care and concern for the Earth.

This is not something new but the growing of a tradition steeped in Scripture that tells us that God “fills the world with awe” (Psalm 104) and that Christ is the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation”, because the entire universe was created in, through and for Him.” (Col. 1: 15-17).

Building on Scripture the Canadian bishops have recently reminded us that “The wondrous beauty of creation ought to lead us to recognize within it the artistry of our Creator and to give him praise. The created world is not simply a place to live or material for our use”.

The environmental crisis, the Bishops of the Philippines have said is “the ultimate pro-life issue”. Care for the Earth, John Paul 11 stated strongly “is not an option for Christians”. So the formal teaching of the Church is not at odds with the modern environmental movement; rather it is a lively participant in it calling each of us to personal conversion and committed action.

One recent call may especially touch our lives as Sisters of St. Joseph, Associates and Companions. In his inaugural homily, Pope Francis referred to St Joseph as “protector” historically of Jesus and Mary, and as protector of the Church in the world today. Francis then calls each person to learn from Joseph the “vocation of being a ‘protector’”.  He explains that vocation: “Being a protector is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and St. Francis of Assisi showed us. It means respecting each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live. It means protecting people, showing loving concern for each and every person … It means building sincere friendships in which we protect one another in trust, respect and goodness. In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts!”

Cosmic Reflections on the Pascal Mysteries

I am walking on a path by the river. Ice has now completely silenced the waters. Snow has blanketed the ground. Trees silhouette their bare and mute forms against the grayish sky.  All seems at a standstill: life stymied by some invisible inner forces. I remember witnessing all the letting go, the surrendering, the stripping, the dying that nature underwent as it transitioned from autumn to winter just a few months ago.

Because I am made of the stuff of the earth myself, I know that there is more to earth’s cycles than what I can observe above the ground. Underneath my feet, at this very moment, death is slowly yielding to the same invisible inner forces that brought it about in the first place. A whole new gestation process is underway; new life is taking shape, vibrating, readying to spring forth in new manifold expressions. For, in all of nature, nothing lives that does not die only to be reborn again, changed by the very experience itself towards something ever new. Such is God’s marvelous design.

I see the same birth, death and rebirth pattern imprinted in our evolving universe, from the first flaring forth, through billions and billions of years of evolution, to now. Galaxies collide, implode. Out of the fragments, new galaxies are born, stars are formed and new astral configurations appear, including a Supernova, home of our solar system, of our earth.   Some stars age and die only to have their dust gift us with all the elements that constitute life today, including my own. I am made of star dust. How awesome!

As science gradually elucidates the Creator’s design, evolution emerges as a continuous movement from life to death, to more and more complex life manifestations. It is not a random process but a movement towards a greater level of consciousness and unity, towards what Teilhard de Chardin calls the ‘Omega point’. And for Teilhard, all is a ‘divine milieu’ and Christ is the Omega point. (1) Is He is not, according to the Scriptures, the one ‘with whom and for whom God created the whole universe’ and through whom ‘God decided to bring the whole universe back to himself’? (2) Is he not the cosmic Christ?

As I prepare to ritually remember with my faith community Jesus’ passion and death and resurrection, I can’t but note how fitting it is that, for those of us living in the western hemisphere, the rhythm of our annual celebration of these paschal mysteries should be anchored in the rhythm of the natural world on the cusp of spring. Effectively, since the fourth century, our Resurrection celebration has been set to coincide with the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

In celebrating the paschal mysteries, I also celebrate all that has been life, death and resurrection on our planet earth and in our evolving universe from the moment our Creator set life in motion. I embrace the pattern of life, death and resurrection within my life and around me. I also hear the longings of my own being for greater consciousness of the oneness of all that is in the cosmic Christ.

1. The Future of Man (1957), The Divine Milieu (1960)

2. Col.1:16, 17, 20